MANILA — President Rodrigo Duterte has backed down from his order to arrest a senator who is a leading critic of his war on drugs, his spokesman said Friday, just as the lawmaker was poised to be arrested in his Senate office.
Mr. Duterte, who was traveling in Jordan, made the decision after meeting with cabinet officials, who advised him to wait for the courts to decide the fate of Senator Antonio Trillanes, the spokesman said. The senator had been holding out at his office since Tuesday, when it was announced that the president had revoked an amnesty he received years ago for his involvement in two military rebellions.
“He will allow the judicial process to proceed and he will wait for the issuance of appropriate warrant of arrest before Senator Trillanes is arrested,” Harry Roque, the presidential spokesman, said in a news conference in Jordan.
Mr. Duterte, he said, “will abide by the rule of law.”
The decision put a halt — at least temporarily — to a brewing drama that saw the military and police officers gather for the imminent arrest of Mr. Trillanes in his Senate office, despite protests from opposition lawmakers who said it would be an abuse of presidential power.
Mr. Trillanes has been a prominent critic of Mr. Duterte, assailing the president for unleashing a violent war on the drug trade that has killed thousands of drug addicts, dealers and, rights advocates say, innocent people.
Earlier Friday, the senator, a former naval officer, said that active members of the armed forces, including senior commanders, supported him in his plight and expressed alarm that Mr. Duterte was trying to use the military to go after his political opponents.
He said he enjoyed “across the board” backing from the armed forces and that he had been consulting with senior members of the military in an attempt to head off unrest over the standoff.
“There are no plans to break away, but they have expressed their concern,” Mr. Trillanes said. “But they are loyal to their constitutional mandate.”
The arrest order was the latest evidence of Mr. Duterte’s increasingly tight grip on Philippine government and society as he seeks to sideline opponents, target critics in the news media and pursue the drug war, which has drawn broad international condemnation.
Another senator, Leila de Lima, has been in jail since last year. The former justice secretary was arrested on what she says were trumped-up charges that she took bribes from drug lords. Like Mr. Trillanes, Ms. De Lima had sharply criticized Mr. Duterte’s drug war.
Mr. Duterte ordered Mr. Trillanes’s arrest after voiding a presidential amnesty granted to him in 2010, over his involvement in two brief, bloodless rebellions when he was a navy lieutenant. Mr. Trillanes, 47, helped lead the uprisings, including a failed 2003 mutiny by some 300 junior officers and others against then-President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. Ms. Arroyo is now a Duterte ally and leads the House of Representatives.
Mr. Duterte’s decision to revoke Mr. Trillanes’s amnesty triggered intense debate in the country, with some arguing that it should have been vetted by Congress first, since it involved a sitting senator. On Thursday, Mr. Trillanes’s lawyers asked the Supreme Court to issue an injunction against the arrest order, presenting what they said was evidence that Mr. Duterte’s reasons for revoking the amnesty were unfounded.
Amid the drama surrounding the senator’s potential arrest, Mr. Duterte decided to cut short his trip to the Middle East and return to Manila on Saturday.
Source : Nytimes
